Mike Whaley: Bob Berry touched many as player and coach

Friday

Feb 17, 2012 at 3:15 AM

When recalling Bob Berry, his friends, former teammates and players couldn't say enough about his impact on others. That's a great way to be remembered. Bob Berry, a Rochester sports legend, died on Feb. 5 in Naples, Fla., after battling Alzheimer's for several years. Survived by his wife, Elaine, and son, Shay, he was 71 years old.

Bob was one of those rare individuals who was able to make the jump from extraordinary athlete to extraordinary coach, a difficult transition for many. He was a three-sport star at Spaulding High School in the late 1950s, playing the key positions of quarterback in football, point guard in basketball and shortstop in baseball. He later attended Brewster Academy and then Southern Colorado State College, where he earned his degree and was a record-setting quarterback on the football team.

That Bob was a great athlete goes without saying. But he may have become an even better coach, guiding high school teams in Colorado and New York before returning to his native Rochester to take over the Spaulding boys basketball program. During his six years his record was 72-48, the highest winning percentage by any coach before or since. His 1973-74 team went 19-5 overall, still the best record in program history, and was one of two teams he coached to advance as far as the Class L semifinals — a rarity for Spaulding teams.

He left Spaulding after the 1974-75 season to join Gerry Friel's staff as an assistant coach at the University of New Hampshire and stayed there until Friel's retirement in 1989 (Gerry died in 2007). He took his show south in 1991 to Florida, still working, but focusing on retirement and his other passions in life — mainly golf and fishing, and a passion for growing orchids.

Bob's impact as an athlete and a coach still resonates to this day. He was inducted into the Rochester Sports Hall of Fame in 1992.

"What I remember most about coach is he was just a tremendous motivator," said Butch Emerson, who played on Bob's teams from 1971 to 1974, including the famed '73-74 team with Jeff Figgins and Steve Harrington. "He had a gifted ability to know when to put a sneaker in your butt to get you going. A minute later he'd be the first guy to hug you and say it's OK. There was always a balance with him."

There was a balance, but Bob also had a competitive flame that burned, burned, burned. "He was fiery," recalled friend and teammate Zane Chase, a 1958 Spaulding grad. "He didn't give a hoot. If he was right, he was right. He was just a great athlete. He was a shortstop, point guard and he was a quarterback. Usually that happens with the great athletes.

"He was feisty," Chase added. "He didn't give a damn who you were; you knew where you stood with him. I had a lot of fun with him."

Another friend, Lee Sanfacon, remembers Berry back in his playing days telling another Rochester Hall of Famer from the late 1950s, the late Roger "Jughead" Tremblay, to hit grounders to him.

As Sanfacon recalled, Bob had a lot of self confidence. He told Jughead he was going to shortstop and for Jughead to take a fungo bat and hit ground balls as hard as he could. Sanfacon laughed when he described the moment. "Bobby said Jughead wouldn't be able to put one by him. He was knocking them down all over the place. He had a lot of confidence and was extremely competitive."

Emerson agreed with Sanfacon about Bob's competitive nature. "As an athlete, he was one of those guys you loved to be his teammate," Emerson said, "because you hated like hell to have to play against him."

Bob took up coaching after college and it became a passion. After coaching stints in Colorado and New York he made his way to Spaulding in 1969. His first team went 14-6 and advanced to the Class L semis.

"We were more of a run and gun team my first three years," said Brad Therrien, who starred on the 1969-70 team and is the program's career scoring leader with 1,700 points. He wanted to instill a little more responsibility, especially on the defensive end."

Therrien and the late Peter Bebris, who still holds the program's single-game scoring record with 54 points, were the main scoring options. Bob still wanted them to score, but he also wanted other people involved.

"He wanted us to be more disciplined," Therrien said, "and responsible, especially on the defensive end." Discipline and defense were the cornerstones of Bob's teams. It was not surprising that Spaulding teams during Bob's time were among the best defensively, several times leading Class L in lowest points allowed.

Bob was also a bit ahead of his time in that he had his hand in the youth programs, summer camps and leagues for his players, kept statistics to chart offensive and defensive tendencies, and he had games filmed so he could show players how they could improve.

"He was one of those guys who made us realize we could do great things," said Emerson, who later coached boys and girls basketball at Spaulding, and currently guides the eighth-grade team at Rochester Middle School, where he also teaches. "He never let us celebrate our victories too long or dwell on our adversity. He was about looking ahead, preparing for what's next."

Next for Bob was college ball. He left Spaulding after six seasons in 1975 and worked with the UNH team as an assistant until the late 1980s.

"He was a guy who was very knowledgeable about the game of basketball," said Ron Layne, who played at UNH from 1974 to 1978 and then coached beside Berry for six years after that. "He was a great Xs and Os man. I scouted with him and he'd come up with a game plan to beat the other team. He had some success doing that."

Layne said Bob loved gimmicks. He recalled they once scouted Holy Cross and Bob came up with the idea that UNH, a slow-down team, should fast break. It worked and the Wildcats won the game.

Bob's son, Shay, who followed in his dad's footsteps as a coach, noted he was honored to have won the Ray Breton Award for the most valuable senior basketball player at Spaulding along with his dad and cousin, Allard Baird (who works in the Boston Red Sox front office).

"That was a big accomplishment for (each of) us, something we shared," Shay said. A longtime college assistant coach, Shay accepted his first head coaching job last fall at Hunter College in New York City. Bob was able to make it up for two games in November to see his son coach his own team.

"They were hard-fought games that we won in the last seconds of the game," Shay said. "He was in the locker room for both of those wins. It was a thrill for me because you could see he was genuinely excited to be part of it."

A lot of people were genuinely tickled to have had their lives touched by Bob Berry. He had an impact that still lingers.

"He had an honesty about him," Emerson said. "There was just a fire, the competitive edge that he instilled in all of us. It was always team first."

That's something Emerson carries with him even today as a coach and teacher. A middle school coach since 2004, Emerson, using the "team first" concept, has successfully prepared players for Tim Cronin's Spaulding High School team, which has resurged to respectability in Division I.

Thank you, Bob Berry.

Mike Whaley is the sports editor for Foster's Daily Democrat and the Rochester Times. He can be reached at mwhaley@fosters.com.